(v. i.) To hold one's self aloof; to forbear or refrain voluntarily, and especially from an indulgence of the passions or appetites; -- with from.
(v. t.) To hinder; to withhold.
Example Sentences:
(1) Also critical to Mr Smith's victory was the decision over lunch of the MSF technical union's delegation to abstain on the rule changes.
(2) Abstainer rates in the total population controlled for treatment decreased with increasing WPY (P less than 0.005).
(3) The adjusted odds ratio of having one or more hospitalization for current drinkers relative to life-long abstainers in females was 0.67 (95 per cent confidence interval 0.57-0.79) and in males was 0.74 (0.57-0.96).
(4) Britain and France formally announced this week they would abstain, along with Portugal and Bosnia.
(5) Although close to 50% of this sample were abstainers, 11% of the drinkers were found to be heavy drinkers, averaging more than two drinks daily, while 18% were high-maximum drinkers, consuming at least five drinks on an occasion prior to pregnancy.
(6) Compared to abstainers, the heaviest drinkers had the highest systolic (JM, p = 0.001; WM, p less than 0.01) and diastolic (JM, p less than 0.002; WM, p less than 0.05) blood pressures.
(7) The Labour leadership is understood to be pressing for its MPs to abstain on the grounds that the party’s policy is under review and the real vote on Trident will come in the decisive “main gate” decision on renewal next year.
(8) But the prime minister failed to win the support of more than half of his 303 MPs after 136 Tories rejected the measure and around 40 Tory MPs either did not vote or actively abstained.
(9) 36% of the group had abstained from further drug taking, 27% were taking them periodically, 32% had to be treated again and 5% had deteriorated (trend towards invalidism).
(10) Their occurrence rules out any organic involvement almost with certainty, and allows abstaining from additional examinations, or keeping them within minimum limits.
(11) They all abstain from social media for fear of getting embroiled in some brouhaha.
(12) Heidi Allen, the Conservative MP for South Cambridgeshire, abstained in last week’s vote but said she and others would defy the party whip if concessions were not offered.
(13) Fourteen months later, 41 subjects (41%) were classified as resumers; 62 (59%) were abstainers.
(14) This finding indicates that many young people exaggerate the risk of losing status among their peers because they abstain from drinking.
(15) At their explosive 80-minute meeting, the union's delegates - who hold 4.5 per cent of the vote - voted by 19-17 to abstain because the OMOV rule change included a further measure promoting more women MPs, one of the union's longstanding causes.
(16) All subjects had been instructed to abstain from smoking for at least 10 h before and during the examination.
(17) The CDC and other health agencies have been operating for months on the assumption that Zika causes brain defects, and they have been warning pregnant women to use mosquito repellent, avoid travel to Zika-stricken regions and either abstain from sex or rely on condoms.
(18) On same-sex marriage, Leadsom said she supported partnerships between gay couples but had reservations about the legislation that led her to abstain during the parliamentary vote.
(19) The salivary cotinine concentration after 1 week in 60 abstainers was 183 ng.ml-1.
(20) Never smoking abstainers die at about the same rate as never smoking moderate drinkers.
Forebear
Definition:
(n.) An ancestor. See Forbear.
Example Sentences:
(1) Modern lungfish are air-breathing nonmarine forms, yet their Devonian forebears were marine fish that did not breathe air.
(2) We need parenting classes that help mothers and fathers identify how they are repeating the negative patterns of their forebears.
(3) The induction of a delirium may be the significant therapeutic event experienced by this patient, and the common event induced by physiologically stressful treatments administered by our psychiatric forebearers.
(4) Our forebears never flinched from modernising the Conservative party, so why should we?
(5) A younger generation see things differently: challenging taboos is less a betrayal of their recent forebears, more a concession to a changing world.
(6) No case of Marfan syndrome are to be found among forebearers.
(7) Indeed, the decision announced today to build stations in the centre of Leeds and Manchester , while definitely correct in terms of bringing benefits to those cities, will increase the cost enormously since, as our Victorian forebears found out, that last mile or so of rail line into urban areas is by far the most expensive.
(8) When Tiberius died Caligua left for Rome where his excessive tastes “were translated on to the most public stage of all – the imperial capital.” He did things differently to his forebears, the polar opposite of Tiberius’s and, before him, Augustus’ moral strategy.
(9) He was contemptuous of the way a powerful lobby had manipulated Jewish American opinion, although this compared with the way "the Greek, Armenian, Ukrainian and Irish diasporas have all played an unhealthy role in perpetuating ethnic exclusivism and nationalist prejudice in the countries of their forebears".
(10) The author analyzes the characteristic inability of public health leaders to support their grand visions in times critical for decision, and calls on the modern community health educator, planner, and organizer to face the explicit question that all but a few of his public health forebears have sidestepped: Is public health a brance of medicine?
(11) Mad Men often gets called a show where nothing changes because of its spiritual forebear, The Sopranos, on which change didn't happen because it was so inconvenient.
(12) As a matter of fact, whereas from the family of Uranium come Radon (Rn 222), Lead (Pb 210) and Polonium (Po 210), these last two, respectively with halving-times of 22.3 years and 138.4 days, from the family of Thorium (Th 232) originates Radon (Rn 220 in past times defined "Toron" according to its "forebear") and Lead (Pb 212 with a halving-time of 10.6 hours).
(13) If you want to understand the minds of our forebears, and appreciate the critical role that art has played in our evolution – issues raised by the British Museum's superb exhibition, Ice Age Art , which closes on 2 June – then the Vézère is for you.
(14) Known as bathing machines, and looking like beach huts on wheels, these contraptions became a ubiquitous feature of the Victorian seaside, helping to protect the modesty of generations of our forebears until it became socially acceptable to walk across the beach in a bathing costume.
(15) We have created educational opportunities beyond the dreams of our forebears.
(16) Man inherits from his animal forebears the biological imperative of an incest barrier but brings to it his special complexity of psychology and symbolization--incest barrier becomes incest taboo.
(17) Their forebears might occasionally question what the Bangladeshis have done to the place.
(18) As we consider the legacy of 20th-century Georgians next year, so let us also remember their forebears.
(19) "And actually when we go back to a normal period of low interest rates – so if they rise by 2%-3%, which is perfectly reasonable even before the three years target that [the Bank of England governor] Mark Carney has set – it's going to have a really dramatic effect on quite a number of households that are already suffering a bit of forebearance on their mortgages."
(20) Our forebears neither knew nor cared how the Romans spoke, so they devised a self-serving system of descriptions that bear little relation to why we say or write things the way we do.